Prime minister Manmohan Singh made a constructive point on Wednesday when he said India's independence will not be complete until poverty is eliminated in the vast country. He pledged a programme of public investment to tackle malnutrition affecting nearly half of the nation's youngest children and a big increase in spending on health, education, agriculture and rural development. Industrialisation will be the best way to tackle unemployment, he argued, but since most of the country's 1.2 billion population live on the land improving their welfare will be the real test of success.
It is good to see socio-economic issues being given priority as India marks the 60th anniversary of its independence from the British empire. As Mr Singh said, India's greatest achievement since then has been to make a success of its democracy. It has survived and flourished in a framework of toleration and secularism that has managed to hold a chaotic diversity of different cultures and beliefs together over these six decades - despite the state's origins in a crude and cynical partition following religious lines between predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Another partition between Pakistan and the breakaway Bangladesh followed the 1971 civil war there, creating three states out of the original British Raj.
Mr Singh 's Congress Party unexpectedly won the 2004 Lok Sabha elections on an egalitarian platform stressing socio-economic reforms. His government is committed to the radical economic opening of the Indian economy in place for the last 15 years. This is now coming fully on stream, with annual eight-nine per cent rates of growth and a definite economic specialisation that puts the country among the most competitive and dynamic in the world.
But the provision and distribution of public goods and services have lagged lamentably behind economic change, creating vast new inequalities between an emerging largely urban middle class of 300 million people and the predominantly rural 800 million majority. Mr Singh's government has been slow to close these gaps but knows there can be great social (and electoral) gains in doing so. There are sound economic reasons for redirecting public policy in this way. It is time to act on them.
Socio-economic progress on a comparable broad scale has eluded Pakistan over its 60 years of independence. There the military has repeatedly filled a political vacuum arising from the lack of a middle class and economic growth on the Indian scale, and the debilitating effects of civil war and continual security tensions over Kashmir. Its leadership is in crisis as General Musharraf struggles to maintain control and debates a new opening towards the political opposition. There is a hopeful stirring of democratic sentiment against military rule under way following protests over the summary dismissal of the chief justice. And there are grounds for optimism that Pakistani and Indian leaders know they must avoid war between each other now that they are both nuclear states.